Despite our very justified fears of false flags and election theft, in all probability, sometime on Wednesday morning, Barack Hussein Obama, the young US Senator from Illinois, will be this country's President-elect.

His handlers have engineered a remarkable campaign, beginning with his keynote address at the 2004 DNC . . .

Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or do we participate in a politics of hope? . . .

Hope -- Hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope!

In the end, that is God’s greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation. A belief in things not seen. A belief that there are better days ahead . . .

Yes - a "belief in things not seen." Embracing the politics of cynicism beneath his coat of many colors and displaying a "stay on message" discipline that has surpassed even Rovian standards, he then picked off every bird on the wire, from left to right, starting with "progressives" and concluding with enough conservative defectors to gut the GOP and leave it with only headless, disembodied limbs reaching for their sniper rifles.

The Republican Party couldn't have nominated a more hapless and distasteful opponent, who ran against and for the sitting president in the same sentence and picked an even more hapless and distasteful running mate. It is as if the Obama campaign was managing both sides(!), with the Judas kiss strategically delivered by an unknown location. Too slick, if you ask me.

Senator Obama survived many threats - the Clintons, Bill Ayers, out-of-control preachers, Joe Biden, Joe the Plumber, Black Agenda Report, Bill O'Reilly, the The New Yorker cover, his steady move to the political right after his nomination, pitiful accusations of "socialist", "Muslim", and "terrorist", and his own middle name.

The man succeeded by carefully morphing from a skinny, mixed-race, South Side street pol to "President Everyman", sinking the occasional three-pointer and smoking the furtive, off-camera cigarette along the way. He clearly won the hearts and minds of the ruling class by out-manipulating and out-triangulating the masters. They've found their perfect front man. Audition over. Senator Barack Hussein Obama is become "The Chosen One". All hail.

The Bush administration is the perfect act to follow. On the surface, there is little that the Obama regime can do to look bad in comparison. It appears that they are planning to get the worst eventuality out of the way first, if Biden and Powell are to be believed. But it will not be Obama who is tested. It will be us. If our recent history is any indication, we'll stay on the disabled list.

This president will enter office with unprecedented power, albeit most of which is neither authentic or Constitutional, but conferred by precedent, forfeit, and myth. No president since JFK has been so meticulously designed, developed, and delivered. Thanks to the incumbent regime, the new guy inherits a fully developed military-industrial-financial-academic complex, a triumphant corporatism, an alienated world, a worthless currency, a ready-made mercenary armed force, unregulated surveillance technology, a one-party oligarchy, a marginalized opposition, a "democracy" reduced to the mindless, meaningless act of voting for a beauty queen . . . oh, the list goes on. Maybe I missed it, but I don't recall Obama saying anything about rolling any of this back. The only thing I've heard is that he'll take a few more thousand from some billionaires and "redistribute" it, while shifting some of our armed forces from Iraq to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, and, perhaps, the streets of Seattle and Billings.

In spite of all the accusations of being "stupid", "crazy", and "incompetent", the Bush administration did their job perfectly, that job being (1) put the citizens at the gunpoint of terror, (2) put the man behind the curtain behind a man behind the curtain behind the men behind the curtain, (3) marginalize virtue, (4) negate the Constitution, (5) bankrupt the nation in every way, (6) carry off the remaining assets. Stealth was not required, nor subtlety, just brute force and perseverance. They got away with it. We were literally robbed blind in broad daylight - and shrugged it off. "Oh, well . . . them damn pollytishuns agin."

Five and six years ago I wrote several times about boiled frogs. I was mistaken. We are, in fact, braised mutton, simmered so long that the meat has fallen from our bones, to the tune of Neil Young: "Helpless, helpless, he -- elplesssss".

All this has been billed as a kick-boxing match between "neoliberals" and "neoconservatives", but in reality it's a been a four-man relay (Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama) and the baton will be passed for the sprint leg on January 20, 2009.

The revolution has occurred. It was televised. It was sponsored by snake-oil merchants and there was never any difference between the "commercials" and the "programs". The next seasons will just be reruns - with different names. And Elvis is still in the building. You can't see him, but you have faith.

"America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can't ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can't lose what you lacked at conception.

"Mass-market nostalgia gets you hopped up for a past that never existed. Hagiography sanctifies shuck-and-jive politicians and reinvents their expedient gestures as moments of great moral weight. Our continuing narrative line is blurred past truth and hindsight. Only a reckless verisimilitude can set that line straight."